Field of Disclosure
The present invention generally relates to delivering audio content within an Internet-based media streaming system, and more specifically, to identifying media features (e.g., musicological features) characterizing media content in order to enhance relevance of media content provided to users.
Description of the Related Art
Streaming audio content has become ubiquitous. One way of delivering audio content is to automatically provide musically-similar audio content that suits the listeners' preferences and interests, rather than requiring the listeners to manually request specific audio content.
Audio content can be described as collections of “musicological features”—values representing audio characteristics of the audio content, such as tone, instrument, genre, etc. Being able to represent audio content according to musicological features allows a system to better identify the types of audio content that a given listener is likely to appreciate. For example, musically-similar audio content that shares similar musicological features with audio content already known to be appreciated by a listener can be discovered and provided to the listener. However, determining the musicological features of given audio content is a large undertaking. Conventionally, human analysts determine musicological features of audio content. This process is laborious and prone to errors and variation. For example, in some systems, it may take approximately 15 minutes for a trained person to identify the musicological features of a song. When aggregated over all the items of audio content for which musicological features are desired, this amounts to an enormous amount of time. Further, inconsistent and inaccurate identifications of musicological features can reduce the effectiveness of audio content.